What may be Thomas Jefferson’s oldest written contribution to legislative business has been brought back into the spotlight by the Virginia Alpha Unit of Registered Parliamentarians.
The manuscript is a draft of a 1769 report on parliamentary rules and procedures written for the Committee of Privileges and Elections of the Virginia House of Burgesses.
Jefferson was 26 at the time he penned the document.
The document existed as two separated halves for many years. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library purchased the top half of the manuscript in 1988 at an auction in upstate New York.
In 2013, Special Collections Curator David Whitesell was shown the bottom half of the document at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair and was offered the chance to reunite the two halves.
“We catalogued it immediately and I also prepared a blog post and announced the reuniting [of] the two halves,” Whitesell said, recalling what happened after the manuscript was in possession of Special Collections. “As soon as we acquired the manuscript we publicized the fact that we had it.”
Once reunited it was clear that the two pieces belonged together. Along the split of the document, the top and bottom halves of letters line up perfectly.
Mary Loose DeViney, a professional registered parliamentarian, learned of the document in a 2014 Massive Open Online Course titled “The Age of Jefferson” with Prof. Peter Onuf. She began researching the manuscript with a fellow classmate and parliamentarian shortly after.
“Special Collections [was] super, once we found the numbers for [the manuscript halves], to send them to us,” DeViney said. “Then we could research and analyze them.”
One interesting thing about the document is that it may have survived the 1770 fire at Jefferson’s home at Shadwell plantation, which destroyed many of Jefferson’s writings.
The end of the second page, written on the backside of the manuscript, ends in “and.”
“We think there are probably some other pages there,” DeViney said. “There’s a lot of interesting questions here. Maybe more questions than answers, but it’s pretty thought-provoking and pretty exciting.”
Whitesell said discoveries like this are often rediscoveries.
“We acquire things to put them in our collection and preserve them for the long term and make them available for research,” Whitesell said. “At one time people may have known about them and that information is forgotten or overlooked.”
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